Unclean (8 page)

Bareris flailed his arm and succeeded in shaking the child-thing loose. It hissed and rushed in again, and he whipped out a dagger and poised it to rip the creature’s belly.

At that moment, he would have vowed that every iota of his attention was on the implike thing in front of him, but during his time as a mercenary, fighting dragon worshipers, hobgoblins,

and reavers of every stripe, he’d learned to register any flicker of motion in his field of vision. For as often as not, it wasn’t the foe you were actually trying to fight who killed you. It was his comrade, slipping in a strike from the flank or rear.

Thus, he noticed a shift in the shadows cast by his floating light. It seemed impossible—the alley had been empty except for the child-thing, hadn’t it?—but somehow, someone or something had crept up behind him while the creature kept his attention riveted on it.

Still on one knee, Bareris jerked himself around to confront the new threat. The lower half of his face masked by a scarf, a huge man in dark clothing stood poised to cut down at him with a broadsword. The weapon had a slimy look, as if its owner had smeared it with something other than the usual rust-resisting oil. Poison, like as not.

With only a knife in his hand, and his new assailant manifestly a man of exceptional strength, Bareris very much doubted his ability to parry the heavier blade. The stroke flashed at him, and he twisted aside, simultaneously thrusting with the dagger.

He was aiming for the big man’s groin. He missed, but at least the knife drove into his adversary’s thigh, and the masked man froze with the shock of it. The bard pulled the weapon free for a second attack, then something slammed into his back. Arms and legs wrapped around him. Teeth tore at the high collar of his brigandine, and cold white fingers groped for his eyes.

The child-thing had jumped onto his shoulders. He reared halfway up then immediately threw himself on his back. The jolt loosened the little horrors grip. He wrenched partially free of it and pounded elbow strikes into its torso, snapping ribs. The punishment made it falter, and he heaved himself entirely clear.

By then, though blood soaked the leg of his breeches, the big man was rushing in again. Bareris bellowed a battle cry infused with the magic of his voice. Vitality surged through his limbs,

and his mind grew calm and clear. Even more importantly, the masked ruffian hesitated, giving him time to spring to his feet, switch his dagger to his left hand, and draw his sword.

“I’m not the easy mark you expected, am I?” he panted. “Why don’t you go waylay someone else?”

He thought they might heed him. He’d hurt them, after all, but instead, apparently confident that the advantages conferred by superior numbers and a poisoned blade would prevail, they spread out to flank him. The masked man whispered words of power and sketched a mystic figure with his off hand. For a moment, an acrid smell stung Bareris’s nose, and a prickling danced across his skin, warning signs of some magical effect coming into being.

Wonderful. On top of everything else, the whoreson was a spellcaster. That explained how he’d concealed himself until he was ready to strike.

For all Bareris knew, the masked man’s next effort might kill or incapacitate him. He had to distupt the casting if possible, and so, even though it meant turning his back on the child-thing, he screamed and sprang at the larger of his adversaries.

He thought he had a good chance of scoring. He was using an indirect attack that, in his experience, few adversaries could parry, and with a wounded leg, the masked man ought not to be able to defend by retreating out of the distance.

Yet that was exactly what he did. Bareris’s attack fell short by a finger length. The masked man beat his blade aside and lunged in his turn.

The riposte streaked at Bareris’s torso, driving in with dazzling speed. Evidently the big man had cast an enchantment to quicken his next attack, and with Bareris still in the lunge, it only had a short distance to travel. The bard was sure, with that bleak certainty every fencer knows, that the stroke was going to hit him.

Yet even if his intellect had resigned itself, his reflexes, honed

in countless battles and skirmishes, had not. He recovered out of the lunge. It didn’t carry him beyond the range of the big man’s weapon, but it obliged it to travel a little farther, buying him the time and space at least to attempt a parry. He swept his blade across his body and somehow intercepted his adversary’s sword. Steel rang, and the impact almost broke his grip on his hilt, but he kept the poisoned edge from slashing his flesh.

Eyes glaring above the scarf, the big man bulled forward, rendering both their swords useless at such close quarters, evidently intending to use his superior strength and size to shove Bareris down onto his back. Perhaps frustration or the pain of his leg wound had clouded his judgment, for the move was a blunder. He’d forgotten the dagger in the bard’s left hand.

Bareris reminded him of its existence by plunging it into his kidney and intestines. Then the child-thing grabbed his legs from behind. Its teeth tore at his leg.

Grateful that his breeches were made of the same sturdy reinforced leather as his brigandine, Bareris wrenched himself around, breaking the creature’s hold and turning the masked man with him like a dance partner He flung the ruffian down on top of his hideous little accomplice then hacked relentlessly with his sword. Both his foes stopped moving before either could disentangle him-or itself from the other.

His sword abruptly heavy in his hand, Bareris stood over the corpses gasping for breath. The fear he couldn’t permit himself while the fight was in progress welled up in him, and he shuddered, because the fracas had come far too close to killing him and left too many disquieting questions in its wake.

Who was the masked ruffian, and what manner of creature was his companion? Even more importantly, why had they sought to kill Bareris?

Perhaps it wasn’t all that difficult to figure out. As Bareris wandered the night asking his questions, he’d mentioned repeatedly that he could pay for the answers. Small wonder, then, if a thief targeted him for a robbery attempt. The masked man had been such a scoundrel, and as for the child-thing … well, Thay was full of peculiar monstrosities. The Red Wizards created them in the course of their experiments. Perhaps one had escaped from its master’s laboratory then allied itself with an outlaw as a means of surviving on the street.

Surely that was all there was to it. In Bareris’s experience, the simplest explanation for an occurrence was generally the correct one.

In any case, the affair was over, and puzzling over it wasn’t bringing him any closer to locating Tammith. He cleaned his weapons on his adversaries’ garments, sheathed them, and headed out of the alley.

As he did so, his neck began to smart. He lifted his hand to his collar and felt the gnawed, perforated leather and the raw bloody flesh beneath. The girl-thing had managed to bite him after all. Just a nip, really, but he remembered the creature’s filthy mouth, winced, and washed the wound with spirits at the first opportunity. Then it was back to the hunt.

It was nearly cock’s crow when a pimp in a high plumed hat and gaudy parti-colored finery told him what he needed to know, though it was scarcely what he’d hoped to hear.

He’d prayed that Tammith was still in Tyraturos. Instead, the necromancers had marched the slaves they’d purchased out of the city. They’d headed north on the High Road, the same major artery of trade he’d followed up from Bezantur.

He reassured himself that the news wasn’t really too bad. At least he knew what direction to take, and a procession of slaves on foot couldn’t journey as fast as a horseman traveling hard.

He doubted the horse he’d ridden up from the coast could endure another such journey so soon. He’d have to buy anoth—

Weakness overwhelmed him and he reeled off balance, bumping his shoulder against a wall. His body suddenly felt icy cold, cold enough to make his teeth chatter, and he realized he was sick.

19-20 Mirtul, the Year of Risen Elfkin

Tsagoth heard the slaves when he and his fellow demons and devils were still some distance from the door. The mortals were banging on the other side of it and wailing, pleading for someone to let them out.

Their agitation was understandable, for in one respect at least, Aznar Thrul was a considerate master to the infernal guards the Red Wizards of Conjuration had given him. He’d ordered his human servants to determine the dietary preferences of each of the newcomers and to provide for each according to his desires.

Some of the nether spirits were happy to subsist on the same fare as the mortal contingent of the household. Others craved the raw flesh or blood of a fresh kill, preferably one they’d slaughtered themselves. A number even required the meat or gore of a human or other sentient being. Tsagoth currently stalked among the latter group as they headed in to supper.

Yes, he thought bitterly, everyone had exactly what he needed.

Everyone but him, as the nagging hollowness in his belly, grown wearisome as the smarting, itching mark on his brow, attested.

The abyssal realms were vast, and the entities that populated them almost infinite in their diversity. Even demons couldn’t identify evety other type of demon, nor devils every othet sott of devil, thus no one had figuted out precisely what manner of being Tsagoth truly was. But had he explained or demonstrated what he actually wanted in the way of a meal, that would almost certainly have given the game away.

A hezrou—a demon like a man-sized toad with spikes running down its back and arms and hands in place of forelegs—turned the handle and threw open the door. The slaves screamed and recoiled.

The hezrou sprang on a man, drove its claws into his chest, and carried him down beneath it. Othet spirits seized their prey with the same brutal efficiency. Some, however, possessed a more refined sense of cruelty, and savoring their victims’ terror, slowly backed them up against the walls. An erinyes, a devil resembling a beautiful woman with feathered wings, alabaster skin, and radiant crimson eyes, cast a charm of fascination on the man she’d chosen. Afterward, he stood paralyzed, trembling, desire and dread warring in his face, as she glided toward him.

Tsagoth didn’t want to reveal his own psychic abilities, and in his present foul humor, tormenting the humans was a sport that held no interest for him. Like the toad demon and its ilk, he simply snatched up a woman and bit open her neck.

The slave’s bland, thin blood eased the dryness in his throat and the ache in his belly, but only to a degree. He contemplated the erinyes, now crouching over the body of her prey, tearing chunks of his flesh away and stuffing them in her mouth. How easy it would be to leap onto het back—

Yes, easy and suicidal. With an effort, he averted his gaze.

After their meal, the demons and devils dispersed, most

returning to their duties, the rest wandering off in search of rest or amusement. Tsagoth prowled the chambers and corridors of the castle and tried to formulate a strategy that would carry him to his goal.

The dark powers knew, he needed a clever idea, because Aznar Thrul’s palace had proved to be full of secrets, hidden passages, magical wards, and servants who neither knew nor desired to know anything of the zulkir’s business except as it pertained to their own circumscribed responsibilities. How, then, was Tsagoth to ferret out the one particular secret that would allow him to satisfy his geas?

Somebody could tell him, of that he had no doubt, but he didn’t dare just go around questioning lackeys at random. His hypnotic powers, though formidable, occasionally met their match in a will of exceptional strength, and if he interrogated enough people, it was all but inevitable that someone would recall the experience afterward.

Thus, he at least needed to concentrate his efforts on those most likely to know, but what group was that exactly? It was hard to be certain when the intricacies of life in the palace were so strange to him. He’d rarely visited the mortal plane before, and even in his own domain, he was a solitary haunter of the wastelands, not a creature of castles and communities.

Perhaps because he’d just come from his own meager and unsatisfying repast, it occurred to him that he did comprehend one thing: Everyone, demon or human, required nourishment.

Accordingly, Tsagoth made his way to the kitchen, or complex of kitchens, an extensive open area warm with the heat of its enormous ovens and brick hearths. There sweating cooks peeled onions and chopped up chickens with cleavers. Bakers rolled out dough. Pigs roasted on spits, pots steamed and bubbled, and scullions scrubbed trays.

Tsagoth had an immediate sense that the activity in this

precinct of the palace never stopped. It faltered, though, when a woman noticed him peering through the doorway. She squawked, jumped, and dropped a saucepan, which fell to the floor with a clank. Her coworkers turned to see what had startled her, and they blanched too.

The blood fiend realized he could scarcely question one of them with the others looking on. He stalked off but didn’t go far. Just a few paces away was a cold, drafty pantry with a marble counter and shelves climbing the walls. He slipped inside, deepened the ambient shadows to help conceal himself, and squatted down to wait.

Soon enough, a lone cook with a stained white apron and a dusting of flour on her face and hands scurried past, plainly in a hurry to accomplish some errand or other. It was the work of an instant to lunge out after her, clap one of his hands over her mouth and immobilize her with the other three, and haul her into the cupboard.

He stared into her wide, rolling eyes and stabbed with his will. She stopped struggling.

“I’m your master, and you’ll do as I command.” He uncovered her mouth. “Tell me you understand.”

“I understand.” She didn’t display a dazed, somnolent demeanor like that of the Red Wizard of Conjuration he’d controlled. Rathet, she was alert and composed, as if performing a routine part of her duties for a superior who had no reason to feel displeased with her.